Interactive Teaching with Plickers (Free Webinar)

Click HERE to Register for the Webinar

Do you use Plickers in your classroom? If not, it's definitely worth taking time to check it out!

Plickers is an amazing FREE formative assessment tool that works like handheld response clicker programs, but it's far cheaper because it doesn't require expensive clicking devices.

If you've heard about Plickers, you might be wondering why everyone is so excited about it, especially if you tried to figure out how to use it on your own. Because Plickers can be a little confusing at first, the best way to learn how it works is to have someone walk you through the set up and explain how to use the program's features.

If you don't know anyone who uses Plickers, I'm here to help! I'm offering a free webinar to show you exactly how to get started and how to use the program to actively engage your students. If you want to know more, click over to the Interactive Teaching with Plickers registration page and sign up now!

In the meantime, let me share a little more about how Plickers works. You won't need to purchase expensive clicker devices because this innovative program uses "paper clickers" that you can print for free from the Plickers website. You only need one card per student, and each card has a unique pattern that can be scanned like a QR code with just about any mobile device.

When you're ready to use Plickers with your students, you'll display multiple choice questions for the class one at a time. Your students will respond to each question by holding up and turning their cards in one of 4 directions. Next, you'll scan all the student response cards from the front of the room by pointing your mobile device camera at the class and “sweeping” it around the room. Within moments, data will appear on your device to show who answered the problem correctly and who still needs help. That same data will also be captured in your online Plickers account to review and analyze later. Being able to capture assessment data quickly and easily means you can teach interactively and adapt your instruction to the needs of individual students without having to take home stacks of papers to grade each night!

I learned about Plickers over a year ago, and I loved it right away! I couldn’t believe that something so amazing was FREE! I started sharing information about it on my Teaching Resources page, and every time I did, the post went viral. Dozens of teachers commented on those posts to tell me how much they loved Plickers and about all the interesting things they were doing with the program.

Plickers 102: Innovative Ways to Use Plickers

Can you tell I'm a little obsessed with Plickers? It's a strange obsession, since I'm no longer in the classroom and I can't even use Plickers with kids! However, seeing teachers get excited about it when I shared it at the Elementary School Conference was almost as fun as using it with kids! To tell you the truth, I was hooked on Plickers when I tested it out at home. That's when I truly understood how it worked and and saw its enormous potential. Since then, I've been enthusiastically sharing what I’m learning about Plickers with other educators.

If you aren't familiar with Plickers, read my original post, Plickers 101: Digital Exit Tickets and More, to get an overview of how it works. Plickers is a free program that’s a cross between hand-held "clickers" and paper QR codes. It’s an amazing formative assessment tool that provides academic performance data in a flash.

Last fall I created a private Facebook group for teachers who wanted to share ideas for using Plickers, and in a few short months that group has grown to over 700 members! Not only do the teachers help each other with technical issues, they are sharing some truly innovative ways to use Plickers in their classrooms. If you're interested in joining the group, you'll find that information at the end of this post.

Within a few days of starting the group, I realized that Plickers is SO MUCH MORE than an assessment tool! Plickers is also a powerful way to connect with your students and to increase engagement throughout the learning process, not just at the end.

Free Plickers Webinars
Plickers can be a little tricky to set up, so I decided to host a webinar with information about how to get started. I knew that one webinar would not be enough to dig into the more innovative ways of using Plickers, so I scheduled a second webinar for those strategies. In that webinar, I also explained how to set up Plickers to keep non-academic data from being included with your academic data. Of course, I checked with the group members before sharing their strategies and photos, and all contributors were happy to be included.

Both live webinars are over, but their recordings are still available for viewing. Plickers 101: Plickers Made Easy and Plickers 102: Beyond Assessment can be found on my Interactive Teaching Made Easy page on Teaching Resources.

Innovative Ways to Use Plickers

Here are some of the most innovative and interesting ways teachers are using Plickers. I introduced the first six strategies during the Plickers 102 webinar; watch the recording if you’d like more information about them. The other strategies were shared in the Plickers Facebook group.

1. Team Plickers Showdown
Have you ever thought of using Plickers as a part of a cooperative learning activity? Showdown is a terrific strategy for practicing or review academic content in teams, and adding Plickers makes it even more fun! It’s similar to the original Showdown activity I described in my post, Show What You Know, with the addition of team Plickers response cards. Watch the Plickers 102 webinar for a complete explanation of how to set this up and when to use the activity.

2. Lunch Count and Attendance
Plickers makes it easy to take your daily lunch count and attendance at the same time. Just create a generic lunch count question with up to 4 responses and change the lunch choices each day. If you make it part of your daily routine to take the lunch count right after the tardy bell rings, you’ll be able to use the results to check attendance.

3. Poll Questions and Voting
Plickers makes it easy for students to respond anonymously to any poll question. It’s the perfect tool to use for class meetings or when asking students to vote on just about anything.

4. Choosing Groups or Topics
If you have a problem with kids choosing project groups or writing topics based on what their peers choose, use Plickers to keep the results private until you are ready to share the results. Students are far more likely to choose what they want to do and not what their friends are choosing.

5. Writing Workshop Status of the Class
Teachers who use writing workshop often start by conducting a “status of the class” to check in with students about where there are in the writing process. Once again, Plickers can be a big time-saver! Instead of polling each student individually and recording their responses on a paper chart, why not use Plickers to scan and record student responses quickly? Enter the question, “What will you be working on today?” Then include up to 4 options like “rough draft,” “need a conference,” “editing and revising,” “final draft.” You can even export your data to a spreadsheet and print it if needed.

6. Social/Emotional Status of the Class
Jessica Vasquez uses Plickers to conduct a social/emotional status of the class each morning. She starts the day by posting a question about how her students are feeling, and she includes a range of responses like, “worried,” “excited,” “calm,” or “scared.” While scanning their responses, she makes a note of students she wants to speak with with privately to find out what’s going on. You could also include words that describe physical responses like “sleepy” or “hungry.” If you don’t have time to talk with students individually, have your students write a short journal entry or letter to you to explain why they choose a particular response.  

7. Choose Your Own Adventure Stories
How about using Plickers when reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book to your class? Tami Terry shared this strategy with the group last week. At each point in the story where the reader has to choose between two actions, she identifies one as the “A” option and the other as the “B” option. The kids vote for A or B with their Plickers response cards, and the results of that quick (and private) poll determine which page she turns to in the book.

8. Parent Survey at Open House
Angela Sievers shared that she recently used Plickers to conduct a parent survey during open house. She said that the parents loved using something that their children were using during the day. I also think it’s a great way to show parents how you are using technology in the classroom, too!

9. Student-Generated Questions
Melinda Harvey shared that after reading about how New Netherlands became New York, her fourth graders generated multiple choice questions, including answers and non-answers for Plickers. She entered their questions and used them the next day as a review. How did it go? “The kids loved looking for their questions, and got a kick out of seeing the non-answers. Some were silly, some were connections to other curriculum areas, some were very astute! I will definitely try this again!”

A Shout Out for the Plickers Facebook Group
I want to thank everyone who shared the strategies and photos I used in both webinars and in this blog post,  as well as the teachers who continue to share in the Plickers Facebook group. If you are not a member and would like to join us, sign up using this Google Doc Form.

Now do you believe me when I say that I'm a bit obsessed with Plickers?! :-)  The concept is genius, and I’m thrilled that the program is free! How are you using Plickers in your classroom?

Plickers 101 - Easy Digital Exit Tickets and More!

What do you get when you cross response clickers with QR codes?

Wait for it…. Plickers! 

Plickers is a free, totally innovative, web-based tool that combines the best of response clickers and QR codes. The program makes it easy for a teacher to get student feedback almost instantly, and the only technology needed is a single classroom computer and a single mobile device. Kids love it, too!

How Plickers Works
Plickers works somewhat like traditional handheld clicker systems. Students respond to multiple choice questions by clicking the letter of the correct answer, and the resulting data is immediately displayed for the teacher. But here's where Plickers is different. Plickers eliminates the need for expensive clickers by using paper clickers, or “Plickers,” that work like QR codes. Each student is assigned a Plickers card with a unique pattern, and he or she uses the same personal response card all year to answer questions posed by the teacher. After a question is presented, the students respond by holding up their cards, and the teacher scans the cards with a mobile device. The results appear instantly for the teacher to view.

To understand how it works, take a look at the sample Plickers card below. Think of the unique square pattern as a sort of “fingerprint” the Plickers software uses to identify each student when the cards are scanned. The number on each side is the number assigned to the student in the system. As you can see, each side displays a different letter of the alphabet (A-D), and these letters represent the multiple choice answers. Students respond to Plickers questions by holding up their cards and rotating them so that the correct answer is at the top. The teacher scans the cards all at once by pointing the camera on a mobile device towards the class and sweeping it around the room. As the system recognizes each card, the results are displayed instantly on the teacher's mobile device.

You can download a set of these cards for free from the Plickers website, but be forewarned that they take a lot of ink to print. Fortunately, you only need to print them once a year if you print them on cardstock and store them properly. Laminating them does help protect them, but you should laminate one and test it out in your classroom before you laminate all the cards. Sometimes the glare from the plastic can cause problems with scanning, especially in certain lighting conditions. One solution is to purchase a set of Plickers cards from Amazon.com which are printed on sturdy paper and are laminated with a non-glare film.

Plickers K-5 Facebook Group
I’m still new to Plickers, and I love exploring its features and uses! To get started, I set up an account at Plickers.com and watched the tutorial videos. The basics were fairly easy to master, but what I really wanted to know was how others were using it in their classrooms. I decided to create a Plickers Facebook group for elementary teachers who wanted to share strategies for using it, and the group has grown to over 400 members in just a few months! If you want to join, you can sign up here. (It’s free!) My group is for K-5 teachers, but Chris Kesler of Kesler Science moderates one for middle and secondary teachers (all subjects). You can find his group here.

Simple Ways to Start Using Plickers Now
I was impressed by the many ways teachers are using Plickers, but I decided not to share them all in this post. It's a bit much to take in when you're just getting started! For now, I'll stick to the three assessment strategies below, and I'll share additional strategies in a future post.

• Assessing Prior Knowledge – Use Plickers to find out what your students know about a topic or their proficiency with a particular skill before you introduce that lesson or unit. You can save a lot of instructional time by determining the appropriate level of instruction in advance.
• Ongoing Formative Assessment – Take time to assess student understanding at least three or four times during a lesson. If your students are not grasping the concepts, it’s far easier to backtrack and reteach those concepts on the spot than to attempt to correct misunderstandings the next day. 
• Easy Digital Exit Tickets – After completing a lesson, assess with a series of Plickers questions instead of paper exit tickets. You won't have to print new exit tickets each day, and you can choose the questions at the end of the lesson to be sure they fit the content and skills you covered. Furthermore, you won't have to take those exit tickets home to grade! You can view the results later as you plan the next day's lesson to make sure the level of instruction is appropriate. You'll also know who's going to need extra help. If you want to review the data before the students leave, you can base your homework assignments on the results. Allow students who get 100% of the answers correct to skip the homework for that night. 

Plickers Made Easy with Task Cards

Have I convinced you to try Plickers? It’s an amazing tool, but there is one BIG problem. As of right now, you have to manually enter all test questions and answers which can be time-consuming. Fortunately, the Plickers team recently added a feature that allows the user to upload an image into the area where you type each question. 

I love figuring out time-saving strategies for teachers, so when I discovered that feature, I immediately wondered if it was possible to upload images of task cards instead of having to enter written questions manually. Within a few minutes I was excited to find out that it works! Images of task cards can be used for questions, and if the cards have multiple choice answers, it only takes a few minutes to upload an entire set of images. In addition to saving you time, this feature is awesome because you can create assessments for topics like telling time with an analog clock or analyzing graphs that require an image. The example below shows one of my Time in Word Form Task Cards as it would appear in "Live View" for your students. As you can see, I didn't have to enter a written question nor any answer choices. I just uploaded the image and told the system which answer was correct. There's really no way I could have entered that assessment item without using an image.  

If this all sounds confusing, don’t worry. I created a step-by-step tutorial to explain exactly what to do. You can download it for free from my TpT store.  

Ready-to-Use Task Card Images

After I discovered how to use task card images with Plickers, I realized that it would be nice if teachers could purchase ready-to-use images of task cards to save the time. I’ve been testing this idea, and my two newest sets of task cards include Plickers-ready images in a bonus folder inside the product zip file. My Time in Work Form Task Cards are shown on the left, and Parts of the Water Cycle Task Cards are displayed on the right. If you would like me to create more task card sets with Plickers-ready images, comment on this post with your suggestions.

Using Task Cards for Whole Group Formative Assessment

Task cards are normally used in centers or in games like Scoot. But being able to use them with Plickers got me thinking about other ways to use task cards, like for whole group formative assessment. So I’m experimenting with adding task card and images to other products that didn’t previously include task cards, such as Sentence Go Round. If you’ve already purchased this product, you can click on the image below, log in to TpT, and download the new file which includes 10 task cards and images. You can use these task cards for assessing prior knowledge, for ongoing formative assessment, or at the end of the activity as a digital exit ticket.

Plickers 101 Wrap Up
As I create new products that include Plickers-ready images, I'll add them to my TpT store. Just click on the Plickers Resources custom category in the sidebar of my store to find them in one place.

My next article in this series will include additional creative ways to use Plickers in the classroom. If you want to be notified when that post is live, sign up for my mailing list.

If you haven't already been using Plickers, I'm sure you're eager to get started! But I'll bet you still have a lot of questions about what you can and can't do with Plickers. Some of those questions are answered on the Plickers site and in online tutorials, but many you'll have to discover through trial and error. Another great place to get answers questions is my Plickers K-5 Facebook group. Newbies are always welcome!

Disclosure Statement: I’m not affiliated with Plickers, and I wasn’t paid to write this post. I’m sharing about Plickers because I’m a strong believer in using formative assessment to drive instruction, and I enjoy figuring out ways to make interactive teaching methods easier to implement. I'm creating a series of products that include Plickers-ready images, and I hope you'll consider purchasing those that meet your needs. Your purchases make it possible for me to continue creating free resources like the Plickers Made Easy with Task Cards Tutorial. I've included an affiliate link to the Plickers cards on Amazon.com which means I earn a small percent of the sales of that product, too. Trust me when I say that I would never link to something that I didn't believe was a great product! Thanks for your support!